Mechanical v. Fluent

These are the dark days of summer.

No, no.  I am not being sarcastic nor, even, facetious.

Thing is, there is no football (soccer, if you will) now until August.  Woe are we.  What to do with ourselves now that the television has nothing to offer that is entertaining; they have even removed the test card!

‘Bones’ is entertaining up to a point but she is so irritating; if I was Seeley Booth I’d very likely have given her a good slapping by now.  Sexist?  Moi?  Non, ce n’est pas possible!  Happily, there is much that is humorous in there but then again see the following comment re: personal lives.

‘CSI’?  OK, but I get fed up with all the personal lives of the characters—just stick to the crime fighting, please.

I do quite like ‘SVU’.  Meloni and Hargitay, as actors, are watchable and the plots are usually very good if, sometimes, heart-rending.

Channel hopping, then.  We have some very odd channels here on ‘Astro’.  We have a channel devoted to things ‘Bollywood’ where, in the films, someone gets stabbed, there’s lots of crying and the ‘baddy’ turns out to be the ‘goody’s’ brother.  Every song in every film is sung by the same singer and every film is identical to the one before it except for the character’s names and the location.

There are Arabic channels, Chinese channels and Malay channels.  Fortunately, there are many channels in English.  Especially the sports channels upon which there is, currently, no football!

Strangely, the High Definition (HD) channels contain no Malay channels and yet there is a Korean HD channel.  I find this to be an anomaly.

Being of a curious disposition, and unutterably bored, I watched a few minutes of a Korean show and was struck with the similarity between this and the Chinese shows on other channels.

That similarity was a stark contrast with Western shows of similar ilk.  I can’t say that there are similar Western shows now but there used to be.  It was called ‘Variety’.  Perhaps the equivalent in the West would be the burgeoning crop of ‘Talent’ shows with which we are now plagued.  The ‘Reality’ show seems to have taken over, a set of broadcasts to be, for my part, assiduously avoided.

However.

[NB:  ‘However’ is a sort of posh ‘but’.]

On this particular Korean show a troupe of performing girlies appeared.  Just as in the Chinese and Japanese versions of similar shows, they were scantily clad but in a kind of ‘chaste’ way in that their shorts had mini-legs on them; they were not, as in Las Vegas productions, cut up to the mid-ribs at the sides.

All very ‘twee’, you might say.

There appeared to be some sort of competition between some of these girls to see how high they could kick.  A line appeared on the screen showing the angle between the straight legs—one raised and the other on the floor; the trick seems to have been to get this line as straight as possible without bending the knees.  Very odd, I thought.

And then they danced.

Oh, dear.

Imagine, if you will, eight or nine small girls with, shall we say, ‘boyish’ figures, all doing the same thing at the same time to some noises in the background which, presumably, they would classify as ‘music’.

So far, so good.

But.

It was mechanical.  They were almost sexily dressed but without actually being sexy.  Their movements were not graceful or sensuous or... how can we put this?  Sexy!  They were going through well-scripted movements like a rehearsed drill sequence performed by a squad of soldiers.  With little effort it was entirely possible to imagine somebody at the side of the stage chanting out, “And one... two... three... four... and... one... ”

It was almost a depiction of Asian society that frowns on sexiness.  Family values are paramount.  This means that there are lots of nightclubs where prostitutes and other dwellers of the night are to be found in abundance.  But not in public.  One does not kiss in public.  Holding hands with one’s spouse is just about acceptable.

Western shows that contain women, and men, too, in revealing clothes are watched avidly.  Many people will point to them and say “See how decadent the West has become.  See how they have no sense of decency or morality.”

Hypocritical, perhaps, but it happens.  Mask the sexy moves and dresses in a wooden framework to make it appear more ‘homely’.

It is that wooden-ness that I wish to confront now.  It is what came to mind as soon as those little Asian girls came on to the stage and began prancing around in their well-timed gyrations.

There are stories available on the Internet from sundry sources that are badly written.  Some of them are badly written because the grammar or punctuation is really bad.

I have said before that the important thing is the story—it is, but that does not mean you cannot get an independent, and critical, eye to oversee what you have written to iron it smooth.

The difficult thing to get over, editors will give up with it, is to have ‘wooden’ texts.

No matter how good your story is if it doesn’t flow it will be a nightmare to read.

Example:

Edna said, “I think you are sitting on my knitting, Edith.”

Edith said, “No, I am not, Edna.”

Edna said, “I believe you are sitting on my knitting, Edith.”

Edith said, “I am sure I am not, Edna.”

Edith said...

I think you get the drift.  That and lists.  Especially:

“Maurice went into the night club and then he ordered a drink of gin and then he drank the gin quickly so that he gagged a little on it before ordering another one... “

Reader succumbs to boredom and slips gently into a mild coma.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the grammar, the punctuation or, even, the spelling.  The syntax is appalling but the story might be great.  Mum will tell you it is a wonderful story and that you are ever such a clever person.  Mum just told your sister, who has the voice of a nightjar, to enter for ‘American Eyelid’ immediately.  To Mum you are exquisite; to everyone else you are execrable if you write like that.

Editors will give up.  Publishers will drop your MSS into bins and Agents will note your numbers so that your calls will go unanswered.

The thing is that nobody talks like that.  Nobody.  Listen to conversations between other people when you are on the bus/train/tube or in a queue.  I find the best place to listen to other people’s chat is in the cinema!  But another time for that little gem!

People’s comments flow.  When people talk they ripple along like water in a stream.  Listen to it and then describe it.

Right, then.  Let’s relook at Edith and Edna.

Edna said, “I think you are sitting on my knitting, Edith.”

“I don’t think I am, Edna,” Edith said

 “I’m sure you are.   I had it over here before tea and put it down where you are now to go to the kitchen,” said Edna, calmly.

Edith said, with some irritation, “I am sure I should feel it if I were,”  she wiggled her rear end in the chair.

Edith sighed...

Not much of a subject but you will, no doubt, see the difference.

Writing has much to do with reading—that much is well known, but, equally, it has much to do with listening and observation.  Look at people when you are out and about, listen to them.

Asimov wrote stories about a little devil that would grant your exact wish for you but there was always a ‘sting in the tail’.  One of the stories about this imp was about a writer who became really fed up with waiting for buses, taxis (cabs), lifts (elevators), waiters—everything, in fact.  The imp granted his wish that he would never have to wait for anything again.  Taxis, buses, waiters, lifts would be immediately available for him without waiting at all.

The upshot was that he never wrote another story.  He never had time to think.  All those times he was waiting for things to come to him were the times when he was composing stories in his head—and watching life around him.

I do believe I’ll go back to watch some of those Bollywood films.  Perhaps there will be something for next time.

Repeat. I Say Again...

This is a repeat of a ‘Blog’ first posted...

Well, not quite a repeat, per se, but certainly it is something that I looked at before and now wish to look at again—in a different way.

A slightly different way.

Tonight we were watching ‘American Eyelid’, or something.  It was, apparently, the Grand Finale, which is, in itself, an odd mixture.  Rather akin to Duck à l’Orange or Canard in Orange Sauce.  Not the spelling (before I get French speakers moaning at me), the pronunciation.  Cf ‘Grand Prix’!  This seems to be ‘Grand Fin-ally’ for some inexplicable reason.  Oh, well. C’est la vie.

Anyway, we were watching TV and so I was bored.  Sometimes it is necessary to sit and watch something together, part of the give and take of life.

They, the people on the show, were trotting out a series of celebrities most of whom were unknown to me and, frankly, could remain that way.

You can see that my interest in the display on the screen was, shall we say, wavering.

Because of this I picked up the remote and was immediately hit with an idea sprite.  I went to the cupboard where things go to die—everyone has a place that houses items, cherished at one time, but which have not been used in, possibly, decades and found a calculator.

It may be that if you are under the age of forty you will not know what a calculator is.  It is the same thing that you have on your computer and telephone to work out odd mathematical problems but, with a calculator, this is all it does.  It does not, for example, tell you the time.

Yes, yes.  Stunningly primitive but we all used to have one.  It saved thinking.

I compared the TV remote to the calculator and found an alarming similarity.  Neither of them are ‘user friendly’.  Not at all.

The TV remote is also a DVD remote and can be used to control ‘teletext’.  Why anybody uses ‘teletext’ any more is completely beyond me—perhaps, in fact, they do not, it is merely an antiquated and disused function on the remote in which case it merely reinforces my argument.

I know.  You haven’t heard the argument yet because I’m still rambling.  Please allow me to ramble, it gives me pleasure to do so and is, in itself, a perfectly innocent pastime compared to some people’s predilections with, say, sheep; about which I spoke in ‘A Simple Guide to Understanding Jet Engines’ (a magnificent book that is obtainable from Amazon at a very reasonable price).

For this next step you will need to go and retrieve your TV remote from wherever it is that you have the television and examine it minutely.

Do you know how to use it?

The calculator.  This has many, many different functions.  Do you know how to use it?

We have a beautiful little camera.  It is electronic, all-singing, all-dancing, self-focussing, anti-shake, no red-eye, point and click.  With lots of buttons.  I have no idea how to use it.

Here is the surprise.

I am a technician.  I mend aeroplanes and teach other people how to mend aeroplanes.  Aeroplanes are easy.  A Boeing 747 holds no fears for me whatsoever!

I do not know how to use the TV remote.

Is this because I am dumb?  Primitive?

No.  I am brilliant.  I am not boasting or being arrogant I am stating a fact.

But I cannot use the TV remote much past switching the TV ‘on’ or ‘off’, changing channels or altering the volume.

There must be a reason for this.

Here is the reason.

Calculators, cameras, TV remotes, et al, are designed by extraordinarily clever people who have all sorts of degrees.

They are not concerned with any difficulty you have in using these devices, their concern is that you should be suitably impressed with their brilliance in designing them.

Almost everything these days is designed by designers for designers.  They are all trying to win some sort of award for ‘Design of the Year’ at your expense.  There is no equivocation here; your well-being is secondary—if it is considered at all.

The words ‘user friendly’ are empty promises dreamed up in a, sort of, marketing conspiracy that will part you from your hard earned cash.

[Idea Sprite:  This is rather along the lines of the ‘Glossy Brochure’ that you get from Car Salesmen.  It tells you everything THEY want YOU to know about their car while carefully avoiding silly and incidental little details like “the exhaust will fall off after eighteen months” or “the seats are perfectly sound providing you don’t actually sit in them or they will instantly tear into a multitude of thin strips if you are wearing anything marginally sharper than, say, a bath sponge”.]

What on Earth does this have to do with writing?

Just recently I have been browsing.  I like to browse.    It does my soul good to browse.  During this meandering through sundry short stories and ‘Blogs’ I have noticed that there are several writers who are able to describe intricate scenes very clearly in simple terms.  I like this.  They get my seal of approval.

These are people like India Drummond, Michael R Hicks, Janie Bill, M R Mathias—all of whom are ‘searchable’ on Amazon.  ‘Blogs’ by Michelle Yunker—‘You Are More Than Enough’, Silver—‘Tantalising Treats’ and Selena Pearce’s ‘Planet Kambing’ (Goat, by the way!  ‘Kambing’ is Malay for ‘goat’).

On the other hand there are prize-winning stories that are indescribably boring.  One was a list, nothing more.  Another one involved a series of incidents that were not explained; they weren’t explained inadequately, they were not explained at all!

These were just two of several stories that were, no doubt, expertly written using magnificent words and perfect syntax, grammar and punctuation but they were unreadable.  There was, to me, no beginning, no middle and, subsequently, no end.  Ergo, they were not a ‘story’.

Is this, I thought, the latest trend?  Is it the modern fashion to write like this?

Then there were the words.

Oh, dear.

I’m sorry to harp on endlessly about my pet hobbyhorse that has no mane because it has worn away with incessant tugging at it.

I like words.  They are fun.  Etymology is a fascinating subject that enthrals me for hours at a time.  Just recently I bumped into ‘spelunking’ again and...  No, no.  Another time, perhaps.

But there are thousands of readers out there who do not want to go to the dictionary every other page; it breaks up the flow of the story for them.

KISS.  Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Just as TV remotes are designed by experts for other experts to admire, there are too many writers out there who are expressing themselves in a manner designed to draw admiration from other academics and literary scholars. 

They are forgetting that the average reader doesn’t care about their wonderful prose—they just want to be entertained.

Speaking of which, I suppose I should go back and see who won; hopefully it will be Steven Tyler.

Mindsets

Funny old World, isn’t it?  One man’s meat is another man’s poison, sort of thing.

As long as you don’t actually say it.

It’s like this.

People love dogs.  I can accept that.  There is nothing wrong with enjoying the companionship of some semi-tame, semi-domesticated pack animal.

Trouble comes with the expression: “I dislike dogs intensely.”

Suddenly you are a pariah.  You are not allowed, in the public eye, to dislike dogs.  Or cats.  You are only permitted to like them.

Of course, to me, any animal that licks its arse and then licks your face is asking for ejection from the immediate vicinity by boot-propulsion.

There is, you understand, hypocrisy here.  It is a free country; you are entitled to your own point of view—no question, as long as it conforms to everyone else’s point of view.

I spent twenty-seven years in the military.  For about twenty of those years I was teetotal.  Oops!  Not allowed.  People in the Services who do not drink are very suspect.  Possibly they are not real men (women, too), they are, certainly, not ‘one of the lads’.  Which, for me, was acceptable other than having to put up with ‘secondary drinking’.

I was often told that there is no such thing as ‘secondary drinking’ in the same way as there is ‘secondary smoking’, which is much, much worse.

Perhaps you should tell some poor wight that just been poled off his motorbike by some drunken clown in a Ford Focus that there is no such thing as ‘secondary drinking’!

Maybe you could emphasize to somebody who has to get up early for shift-work that the guy(s) singing their head(s) off outside his house at two in the morning are “only trying to enjoy themselves”!

Then there are vegans!  It’s fine to be a vegan.  I have absolutely no objection to anyone choosing to be a vegetarian or vegan or whatever.  Be what you want to be.

Please do not tell me that I should be a vegan as well.  My teeth were designed to be omnivorous.  My digestive tract was designed over several million years to eat whatever I could pick, dig up, drag out of the water or kill.  I like meat.  Especially fish.  I love fish.  Please resist the temptation to tell me what is wrong with me eating fish; I will not listen.

Note that, if you like milk, that cows only give milk after they have given birth—they are much like humans in that respect.  What are you going to do with all those calves that are starving to death because we are drinking their Mum’s milk?

I know!  I have a plan.  We will kill them and have veal in sandwiches or lightly fried in breadcrumbs as a schnitzel.  Wonderful for us and it is not a problem for the calves because they will be dead.

We shall try, very hard, not to anthropomorphise them; they are not ‘different looking people’, they are not like children and they are not ‘cute’.  They are animals.  They do not laugh, cry, tell jokes or understand what you say to them. 

They are food on legs, for the most part.

Except dogs and cats.  They are not food for us.  But, still, they do not understand us.  Dogs lick our face not out of affection but because this is the way they beg for food from the Alpha Male/Female in the pack.

If it has just been cleaning up its rear end...

But we are not allowed to say these things.  It is all right to be proud of being, for example, vegan but it is not good to say that you love eating meat—it is not ‘politically correct’.

It is fine and patriotic to be proud of being Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Malawian or whatever but it is bad taste to be proud of being English.  We must be British.  Well, I’m not.  I’m English.  And I’m proud of it.

While we’re about it, I’m not homosexual, either.  That’s something else I’m not allowed to mention, isn’t it?  We are supposed to support homosexuals, we are meant to say they are fine, good chaps, etc.

They are not gay.  A maypole is gay, a bunch of flowers in the hands of a child dancing is gay; homosexuals are not gay.

The Torah, the Bible and the Q’ran all say that homosexuality is a no, no.  Keep it in the closet.  I don’t mind anybody having weird sexual preferences but I don’t want to know about it.  I don’t want ‘same sex’ marriages or two people of the same sex adopting children.

I don’t flaunt the fact that I’m heterosexual over and above the fact that I’m married—and happily so, thank you very much.  Please don’t flash your homosexuality about in parades, and newspaper articles, it is not seemly.

Be what you want to be but keep it to yourself like civilised people do.

But we can’t talk about that.  It isn’t politically correct.  People don’t like it.

That means you must not write about it.  Start putting opinions in your stories about things that people don’t like and they are going to throw your book on the fires and chant slogans about you.

There are certain sections of the UK population that are, primarily, immigrants.  They like to hold noisy rallies to complain about the country that they have chosen to live in; they wish to change it to their way of thinking.  Apart from the idea that, if they do not like their situation in UK then they should return from whence they came, why can they not integrate and conform to the customs, traditions and laws of their chosen country of residence.

We are not allowed to say anything about them even if they can say as they wish about us.

Of course, you will note that few of them have best-selling books in UK.

Your story does not have to be politically bland but far-reaching views that are not politically correct are definitely to be kept for the pamphlets.

Or ‘Blogs’?

Perceptions

How perceptions do seem to vary from one person to another as well as over time.

Different people have different ways of thinking. Time?  Time gives us new discoveries and enlightenment born of additional information.  Very often we will, as we get older, assess and process information differently.

Everybody used to say that Granfer Harris—who was, it must be said, my Great Grandad, was difficult.  Mum would frequently tell me that he was a hard man to please.  But, then, he was old.  Us old people get away with a lot because people don’t expect too much of us; we can be rude and people will just shrug and whisper, “He’s old...”

At least now I can say a girl is pretty (or shapely) without anybody thinking that I’m trying to chat her up!  I’m past that now.  Fortunately, I must say.

But Granfer Harris probably had Alzheimer’s.  My Mum had that and she became very difficult until we managed to get her on the correct medication.  Violent, too.  She was violent but the new drugs—‘Anti-Terrorist’ pills, the Maid called them, worked well and calmed her down for the last few months of her life.

Like Granfer Harris she lived to a ripe old age, she was about 94 (as I have mentioned before).  Also like Granfer Harris, she could not differentiate night from day.  Granfer, my cousin Ann tells me, would often tell her Mum to ‘switch the bloody light off, Mary!’   When the light was already off and the bedroom was dark.

He also ‘saw’ people who had already died.  They weren’t ghosts but people who ‘lived’ in his memory.  Mum had the same thing.  She would walk around at three in the morning calling out for Dad.  “Brin!  Brin!  Are you there, Brin?”  We had to tell her that he was working and that she should rest so that she would be well for when he came home.  Or her sister, Muriel, that died many years ago in Canada; she saw Muriel and herself as young girls.

Occasionally Mum would tell us that she was a young boy.  My wife would be Mrs. Brown (she is brown but that wasn’t, I’m sure, the reason!), or ‘Matron’ if Mum had relapsed back to the orphanage.

Eventually all the recent memory faded out.  She always seem to remember our son here and, sometimes, she might remember who I was but, for the most part, she lived in her youth.

Granfer Harris’ and Mum’s perceptions changed with disease.

I am telling you these things because one of my favourite authors, the great Terry Pratchett, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Yes, I know that this is hardly ‘hot off the press’ but it is something that we have to address.  He is, I am sure, terrified of not being able to function as he would wish but, on the bright side (if there is one), he will not be aware of what is happening.

Mum slipped away peacefully on Monday morning having had a good night’s sleep for the first time in many, many weeks.

Those of us that are left behind will bear the grief.  We will have to accept the loss.

When Asimov passed on we knew then that there would be no more ‘Foundation’.  When Arthur C Clarke died in his beloved Sri Lanka there would be no more space odysseys or rendezvous with Rama.

One day there will be no more ‘Discworld’.

And that, dear souls, will be a sad loss.

Craft

At last.  The proof reading for ‘Crater’, ‘Meevo’ and ‘The Hags of Teeb’ is over.  All three are now available on ‘Kindle’.  “Hishgraphics” has designed a super new cover for ‘Crater’ so that’s a major milestone out of the way.  He is also looking at another couple for me.  Good man, that.  A rare talent.

Sit back and relax?

No.  Proof reading starts for “Three’s Company” and “Ruthermore Heidigens”*.

[“Three’s” is a short story of just under 5,000 words and “Ruthermore” is about 16,600 words so is classed as a ‘Novelette’.

Novel               =            40,000+ words

Novella            =            17,500 - 40,000 words

Novelette         =            7,500 - 17,500 words

Short Story      =             Less than 7,500 words.]

These are three distinct story types.  “Crater” is a somewhat gentle horror story with a thread of hope running through it but is, otherwise, straightforward Science Fiction.  “Meevo” is also Science Fiction but is somewhat more chilling, certainly darker, with a pessimistic view of ‘things to come’.

“The Hags of Teeb” is a poke at the British mind-set with particular reference to their (our?) approach to foreigners and the ‘Class System’.  It is, then, an attempt at humour but its success will depend on your sense of humour.  Either you ‘get it’ or it falls short of the anticipated gales of laughter.  In spite of that, I suspect that everyone will love the ‘Herds of Dollib’!

Now moving on to re-look at “Three’s Company”.  A much gentler story, a romance, even, of sorts.  Soft twilight fluttering through the gently waving branches until the twist at the end gleams gold upon the mind.

And “Ruthermore Heidigens”.  *Provisional title at present.

This is a tale of the ‘greatest Wizard in the known Universe’, which is self limiting on account of he is the only Wizard in the known Universe and that the ‘Known Universe’ consists of four planets that are, each and every one, steeped in their own dogged cynicism against such things as magic.  They are not, however, steeped in disbelief of crime.

The title is provisional because the story has only been roughed out at the moment and there may be another one on the edge of my mind ready for typing up.  We shall see how time permits.

All this means, as I have mentioned in another ‘Blog’, that original stories are being shoved further back in favour of doing ‘other things’.

I do fear forgetting the stories that come to mind while ‘other things’ are being done.  Making notes generally confuses the issue because I go back to those notes and am completely unable to interpret them into anything that resembles a meaningful story.

If I make the notes longer, I might as well write the story!

At some point or other the “Deep Space Squadron” stories are going to land on my desk again with a note stuck to the top saying “Proof Read—Check” with an assorted bundle of suggestions from the Publisher saying “What about this” or “that”?

“Deep Space Squadron” is almost a novel length story.  That means a week of proof reading.

What is the point of this meandering?

Well.

Lots and lots of people out there want to write a story.  Do it.  Then those people will say, “This is a great story—let’s get it published”.  Yes.  Try.

On another ‘Blog’ I said that the writer’s job is to write.  Let us get on with doing that.

Yes, it is.  But.  Editors and Publishers will want to change things to make them more ‘acceptable’ or ‘marketable’.

For instance, there are things that you may write that the Publisher will throw up their hands and say “Whoa!  You can’t put that in, this book is for sale in a country that worships trees—can you imagine what they will think of a story about lumberjacks?” 

Change their trade.

Asian locations are rarely acceptable in the West because Western readers are not, normally, able to identify with them.  Yes, there are exceptions; the “Wind Up Girl” is one of them—it is set in Thailand.

Write to your market but write about what you know.

And then get someone else to read it.  Critically.  Not your Mum.  She will say it is great.  Have you ever seen ‘American Idol’?  Somebody has told many of them that they can sing and yet they sound, the better ones, like a crow with laryngitis.  Very often the ones that get to the finals are a shade short of talent but they will, no doubt, make a living out of their singing.  I do try not to compare them with Shirley Bassey or Ruby Murray.  They practised, they rehearsed.  They worked at it just as artists do, it is a craft—a trade.

Writing is like that.  Writing a book is one thing but you have to be prepared to go back to that same story time and time again until you are bored to death with the whole thing because that is what it takes to create something special.

When I first wrote “The Hags of Teeb” it was just hammered out on the keyboard to exorcise it from my mind; there was no intent to make it public—it was, I thought, rubbish.  But my wife read it and said, “This is the best thing you’ve ever written, it is just brilliant!”

Rats!

This meant going back over it to tune it and polish it.

“Meevo”.  I loved writing this story.  My son asked me for an ‘army’ story and this came out of his request.  I really enjoyed creating this but, after five thousand corrections and rewrites (OK, exaggerations come with the territory!) it begins to get a bit ordinary, the ‘fear factor’ has slipped out of it for me.

But you should know that, in spite of my moaning and griping, those stories are better now.  The suggestions and interpretations from others, and the work put in, have improved them.

What you write is based on a story in your head.  You put inflections and emphasis on words and situations that others, in reading, will not.  This changes the tone and complexion of the story.  They will not read what you have written.

That is why it isn’t just a good idea to have an independent reader go over your work critically, it is imperative.

It is a rare gift to be able to write a story in one go and it is immediately ready for publication.  So rare that only the greatest masters of all have ever done it.  Even Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke (the Big Three) did revisions.

Don’t know about Chaucer and Shakespeare.

"Twinkle Twinkle... "

http://bit.ly/mKQxvI

I was browsing through ‘Chele’s ‘Blog’ (Michele Yunker—see link above) because it is always worth a read—and then a reread to make sure I haven’t missed something.  ‘Chele writes very deep thoughts so a second read is always a good idea; those thoughts are such good reading that missing something would be a shame.

Well, it occurred to me that we were thinking along similar lines.  My ‘Blog’ should have been up a few days ago but enforced idleness caused by excruciating agony in the lower back prevented me from accessing my computer.

Fortunately, the ‘Massage Man’ (Dino) has been now so I am more mobile.

These are the lines that I had sketched out previously:

We lived in a very, very small village in the wilds of East Devon.  Like all villages of this type it has a distinct mentality.  Let me explain what I mean.

At the age of six years I was walking to school down a very dark lane accompanied by my neighbour, a mentally challenged young man of a year’s seniority over me.

He sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star; How I Wonder What You Are?”

At that age my hobbies were exploring the fields, rivers and seaside and, when wet, reading.  I read books about birds, trees, aeroplanes and astronomy.  Let me point out that I could not, and still cannot, poke a finger at a star and tell you its name; indeed, I have just about all my brain cells firing to make out the ‘Milky Way’!  But I loved to read about planets, stars, comets and space, generally.

“We know what stars are.  They are the same as our sun but so far away that they appear as points of light.  They twinkle because of the light passing through our atmosphere.  Light from the planets doesn’t twinkle because the points of lights are bigger.”  Was my response to his song.

He looked at me as if I had just soiled my trousers.

Result?  Several weeks of mockery at school—from everyone.  “Ho, ho!  He thinks stars are the same as our sun.  Everyone can see they are smaller!”

Requests from me for alternative explanations fell on deaf ears and invoked even more abuse.

It was at this point that I became aware of how Galileo must have felt and, furthermore, that being clever was not clever.  Being smarter than other people just made you a pariah.  Especially in the village mindset.

At ten years old I passed the 11-plus Exam.  Yes, yes!  I took it early because my birthday is in August.  Nobody else in the school passed.

Rushing home to spread the news, I told Mum that only one person in the whole school had passed.

“Really?” she asked.  “Was that Jeannie Mitchell?”

“No.”

“Sally Clift?”

“No.”

“Arthur Stone?”

“No.”  I was jumping up and down with impatience.  “No!  No!  It was me—it was me!”

“Don’t be silly, David.  We shall find out soon enough.”

Deflated.

And then—could we afford for me to go to the Grammar School?  Oh, dear.

I went to the Grammar School.  Wasted most of it.  Trying hard not to ‘stand out’ made failing easy.

This is called ‘conforming to peer pressure’.  The village mentality was winning.  Success was measured, as I have said before, by getting on the bus in the morning with a bag of tools, a lunch-pack and a flask of tea to go and do a ‘proper day’s work’.  This means having a trade like carpentry, brick-laying or plumbing.

You don’t have your own business because that’s for people who are ‘better’—it is important to know one’s betters and to know your ‘place in society’.

Money is bad.  It is regarded as ‘filthy’.  People are ‘filthy rich’.  They live in a different strata of society which is not for the likes of us.

I had to escape.  The military was the only real, practical, outlet.  This was where I discovered that I didn’t want to be an officer.  Why?  Because a senior officer told me, at one point early in my career, that officer’s were not ‘ethereal people who lived in the clouds’.  Oddly enough, I had that one figured out for myself from day one.  But I didn't want to be part of a group who thought like that!

Don’t get me wrong, there are many really good officers and a couple, even now, that I count as friends but, like all sections of the community, there are good and bad.

The military was another sub-set of peer pressure.  In this population you had to drink.  This was necessary in order to be a ‘real man’.  Non-drinkers were regarded as soft and effeminate.

So I stopped drinking.  Strangely enough, I did not become soft and effeminate although I was excluded from social functions to a greater extent unless a driver was required.

I had to escape.  Somewhere, lurking in a crevice of my mind, was the real me.  It may be darker than the one that had assumed a veneer over my character but it had to be released

We are still not there yet.  There is still a mix of the village mentality and the military mind-set trying to rise to the surface like an unwanted scum.

Perhaps I am now too old to change; the real me has been incarcerated inside my sub-conscious for so long that it will never get out completely.

At least I know now that nearly all the rich people I meet are really nice, genuine and, oddly enough, honest people who are generous with their help and advice.

That’s one wall that’s crumbled

All that’s really left is to convince myself that I really, really do not have any ‘betters’!

Granfer Harris

When I was extremely small—yes, yes, I know; hard to imagine, isn’t it!  We moved to a tiny village, as it was then, called East Budleigh.  This was a place with two shops, two pubs and a church embedded in East Devon, England.

At that point my Great Granddad was still alive.  I have a vague memory of a very old, but very robust gentleman leaning on a stick watching me enter the house.

The house was behind the brook where we would search for small eels, caddis fly larva and snail.  Perhaps, on a good day, there might be a small fish—a stickleback, with luck.  Incidentally, if you fell in the brook you would become a ‘proper East Budleigh Boy’, which is where my cartooning name, EBB, comes from.

It wasn’t until much later in life that I learnt that this gentleman was my Great Granddad.  He was referred to, in the family, as ‘Granfer Harris’.

Granfer used to enjoy irritating my Gran, his daughter, by calling her youngest son ‘Jack’.

“His name is ‘John’.” She would respond.  Irritated.

He would poke people with his stick and, during the war, would eat everyone’s entire butter ration in one go.

He was described, variously, as ‘difficult’ to a ‘nasty old man’.

It may be that he had ‘Alzheimer’s’.  We shall never know now.  Certainly he was going off in his head but in those days people just shrugged and said, “He’s old.  What can you do?”

When he was a young man, Granfer Harris would go to the dance in Sidmouth every Saturday night.  Sounds like a simple plan, there being no TV, radio, etc.

Sidmouth is eight miles away.  Nearly, if you like, fourteen kilometres.  There were no buses or taxis.  He had no car or motorcycle.  He would come home from work, wash, change and then walk to the dance.

Then he would walk home.

And be at work the next morning.

He worked in the sawmills.

Let’s just set a scene here.  East Budleigh is famous for being close to ‘Hayes Barton’, the birthplace of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Walter did the same as Francis Drake, really, but Francis got to be very high and mighty but Walter was beheaded.  Not much justice then, just the whim of the Crown.

Hayes Barton is in the shape of an ‘E’ when viewed from above; such was the architecture of the Elizabethan period.  It is almost exactly one mile from the centre of East Budleigh.  The sawmills are nearly halfway between the two.

Originally, the saw was water powered by a leat (man-made channel leading to a mill) off East Budleigh brook but they modernised and put in a steam engine.  The saw was a very large circular piece of metal, which was, in those days, unprotected.  Health and Safety at Work was not even a dream in then.

Granfer saw himself as a fortunate person.  He had a shade over half a mile to walk up Hayes Lane to get to work.  Some people would have to walk two, or three, miles to get to their jobs.

The mentality of the villagers was that you work.  To be successful you went off with a lunch pack and a bag of tools to do a ‘proper day’s work’.  Work they did.  ‘Fun’ was rationed out to, perhaps, once a week and consisted of playing cards or sitting around the fire with the family reminiscing.

If it was light you worked.  In the house, in the garden or at your job.  That was life.  It was the best you could expect.  If you had enough to eat, a roof over your head and a wife then you were fortunate.

One day, at the sawmill, Granfer had an accident.  Somehow he managed to slip, the saw sliced his skull open.  Through the bone.

No problem.  He walked home, put a bandage on it.

Then returned to work.

My how we whimper at the slightest trial or tribulation that comes our way.

“Oh, I simply cannot write today.  I just don’t feel motivated, Dahling!”

“Call an ambulance, quickly—I think I’ve split a nail!”

“Someone has just called me a nasty name on ‘Facebook’.”

Oh, poor dear!

Now we have so much to lean on.  There are professional carers and medical people who will poke, prod and analyse our every move both physical and mental.  Ever ready, they are, to supply us with an excuse why we should not function as a member of society.

When you feel least like writing—write.

Get some discipline and just do it.  Life is too valuable to waste on self-pity and boredom; the older you get the less life you have remaining to you.

“Oh, I really cannot write today, Dahling.  My head is just splitting!”

Yes.  So was Granfer Harris’ head but he went back to work.